The Wolfpack Mom on Her Sons’ Art Show at Jeffrey Deitch’s Gallery

This past June, director Crystal Moselle’s documentary The Wolfpack, already riding a wave of Sundance hype, opened in theaters to a flood of praise. The film told the story of the Angulos, six cinephile brothers who had been raised in virtual captivity in a Lower East Side apartment by their xenophobic, prison warden of a father, Oscar, a Peruvian follower of Hare Krishna, and by their loving but oddly passive Indiana-born mother, Susanne. Permitted to leave at most a handful of times per year, the brothers were homeschooled by Susanne and entertained themselves by watching hundreds of movies and reenacting their favorites in productions that grew increasingly complex, incorporating elaborate homespun costumes and props, transcribed scripts, and movie posters.

But as the brothers grew older and more resentful of Oscar, who appears at one point in the film drunk and belligerent, the situation grew untenable. Eventually Mukunda, the third youngest, sneaked out of the apartment, a daring move that opened the locks to full-bore rebellion. Moselle encountered the boys—a pack of striking, identically long-haired adolescents in matching Reservoir Dogs suits—during this grab for independence, as they roved the streets of their city gulping in the outside world. She began following them with a camera, and by the time her film was released, five years later, the Angulo brothers were well on their way to transforming their lives. Govinda, one of the oldest, had moved out. Krsna and Jagadish had changed their names to the ’80s-rocker inspired Glenn and Eddie. All the boys were hard at work pursuing their artistic and professional ambitions: Mukunda and Govinda in film, Bhagavan in dance, Narayana in environmental advocacy, Glenn and Eddie in music.

This week the Angulos are realizing the dream of artists everywhere: They’ve mounted a show at a major New York gallery. Starting yesterday, the drawings, props, and costumes they made for their DIY movie productions, as well as Window Feel, an original short film directed by Mukunda, goes up at Jeffrey Deitch’s new space on Grand Street in Soho, alongside the photographer Dan Martensen’s portraits of the brothers.

When I arrive at the gallery to preview the show ahead of its official opening, Mukunda and Eddie, who is now sporting bleach-blond shaggy hair, are there helping with the installation. “This is like our living room,” Mukunda announces joyfully to no one in particular about the white box space, temporary home to an invasion of the Angulo brothers’ colorful cardboard and paper constructions.

Just beyond Mukunda stands Susanne, the person I’m here to see. The Wolfpack left many people curious about the Angulo matriarch. On the one hand, her loyalty to her husband enabled her children’s bizarre, outsider upbringing. On the other, she comes across as profoundly giving and supportive of her kids. And as Narayana, one of the oldest, told Nightline, it was Susanne who bore the worst of Oscar’s tyranny: “She had more rules than we did. Any little thing that she did wrong she was put on trial.”

On camera we saw Susanne, inspired by her sons, slowly reclaiming her autonomy, making first contact with her elderly mother after a 20-year estrangement. But she also seemed to remain uniquely vulnerable to future manipulation from Oscar. In the last scene of the movie, Moselle captured a moment that perfectly described Susanne’s plight: The family took a field trip to a farm, and while the boys romped around rambunctiously with the enthusiasm of animals freed from a cage, Oscar kept his distance, holding tight to Susanne’s hand and pulling her in the opposite direction. Both were miked so we could hear their conversation: “Let’s see what they’re doing,” Susanne said. “We haven’t been around them all day. It’s all right to be around them.” She tried to pull Oscar toward the boys, but he resisted. Finally Susanne broke free, muttering to herself, “It’s hard to go off and go off and go off.” She joined her sons. “We haven’t had the chance to walk through the orchards together,” Mukunda said wistfully, embracing his mother.

“I’m just awestruck,” Susanne says to me when I ask her how it feels to see her sons’ work hanging in a gallery. “Knowing that all this stuff has been stuffed in the closet, to see it all displayed like this, it’s amazing, it really is. It has been my dream to someday frame all this stuff. I would like to have a wall, maybe in a house that I move to, with all of the things they’ve done, framed.”

Susanne has graciously agreed to take me around the show and to share some memories of the work on display. In person she’s petite and stylish, her gunmetal gray hair a bit shorter than it was on camera. She’s decked out like a cool art teacher in a silky teal button-down that brings out her bright blue eyes, slim black pants, and, most notably, a pair of green leather monk-strap boots dotted with tiny grommets. They’re a far cry from the drab, unremarkable clothes she wore on camera. I remark on her shoes and ask if she’s developed an interest in fashion, which draws a big laugh. “I mean, my standard uniform before for so many years was just a loose pair of baggy pants and a T-shirt, and now it’s like: Oh, there are other clothes to wear.”

Much of Susanne’s life is separated into then and now. She has reunited with her 89-year-old mom and her sister, who is in town for the show. She’s planning a Christmas trip back to the Midwest. She’s even legally reclaimed her maiden name of Reisenbichler, something she says she’s wanted to do for a while. “I never felt comfortable changing my name to my husband’s name,” she tells me. “It just kind of happened. My name is my name: Why would I want to change it?” Oscar, I’m surprised to hear her report, was okay with it. “He was like, yeah, you should do that if you want. Because in German, reisen means ‘to travel.’ I’ve always felt like that fit me; I’ve always loved to travel.”

Is this the same Oscar who kept his family in a tiny apartment under lock and key? “He’s adjusting a lot,” Susanne insists. “He’s pretty flexible. Our relationship has done a 180. There are still a lot of things that have to be worked through and communicated about. But we’re still doing and we’re still seeing.” Now is when we get to the things that have not changed: Susanne remains committed to her marriage. She still lives with Oscar; their daughter, Visnu, who has Turner syndrome; and five of her sons in the same Lower East Side apartment. (Some of the boys, she says, maintain a superficial relationship with their dad; others don’t speak to him.) And she still devotes herself to homeschooling her youngest child, Eddie, now a senior in high school. Any thoughts about her own future, Susanne says, are on hold until he graduates.

Speaking of Eddie: Susanne points out a glass display case. Placed among props from movies like Platoon, Halloween, and The Lord of the Rings is a sweet little cardboard hummingbird. “Eddie made that for me for my birthday,” Susanne tells me. “I was just so touched because I had told them this story of when I lived in this house in the country and a hummingbird got in. We had these big windows, and it was flying against the window. It couldn’t get out. So I just gently took it in my hand”—she cups an imaginary hummingbird between her palms to show me—“and went outside. It was like I had nothing in my hand. It was just like, huhh,” she says, exhaling hoarsely. “So exhausted. It took maybe 30 seconds before it flew away.”

Susanne is a nature lover, a fact that makes the 14 years she spent shut away all the more cruel. She hopes she can still teach her kids the same love of the outdoors. Over the summer, she and Oscar took their daughter and two of their sons on a family vacation to Yellowstone. Susanne’s face comes alive when she talks about the trip. “Even more than all the wildlife was being out in the wild,” she remembers. “Camping all the time. The only time that we were inside was when we were driving in the car.”

We move around the gallery counterclockwise, talking about what we see. One wall is plastered with drawings of the album art for records by AC/DC and Yes, bands that count among Susanne’s favorites. “Govinda did all the Yes albums, I remember. And Mukunda did all the AC/DC albums. I just thought, Where do you get your patience from?” Their artistic ability, she says, comes from Oscar. “I have a hard time just coloring in the lines in the coloring book.”

Nearby there are two sets of shoulder-height shelves that hold cardboard machine guns and weapons of all sorts, as well as flack helmets from Platoon, bearing slogans like “When I die, bury me upside down so the world can kiss my ass.” “They wanted it to be very realistic,” Susanne explains when I ask if she finds any of it disturbing. “I was like, well, that’s how they want to do it.”

Halloween was a major event in the Angulo household, so the back of the gallery is devoted to horror movies. The far wall bears re-creations of posters for scary movies like Halloween, Night of the Living Dead, TheSilence of the Lambs, and TheWicker Man. There’s a section devoted entirely to Wes Craven. “Bhagavan used to dress as Freddie from ANightmare on Elm Street,” Susanne says. The brothers had been scheduled to meet Craven this summer, but the director, who was ill, canceled. Shortly after that, he passed away. The boys were “heartbroken,” says Susanne. “They love his movies. They feel like they know him.” A pile of dead leaves creeps up the back wall, a disembodied hand reaching up from within. The whole setup is a re-creation of something the boys do every October at home. “They put these pictures up,” says Susanne. “They decorate the whole apartment with leaves. They usually build some kind of structure in the living room. Everything got moved out.”

Moselle caught one Halloween on film in the documentary. The boys, wearing masks and costumes, danced around in a circle holding lit candles, marching to “This Is Halloween” from The Nightmare Before Christmas. They look like they’re participating in an ancient pagan rite. “It was a chance for them to just do whatever and to be free,” Susanne says about why Halloween was such a special holiday. “To really let their artistic side out. Whatever they wanted to do, it didn’t matter how outrageous it seemed, it was okay because it was Halloween.”

In the center of the room, two lifelike Dark Knight–era bat suits hang on thin stands, each indentation and protrusion of molded rubber painstakingly refashioned in cardboard. One of the suits, Susanne remembers, Mukunda slaved over for three years. He based his measurements on a Batman doll, then realized too late that the doll didn't reflect real proportions. “It didn’t fit,” says Susanne. “So then he would pause the movie when there was a frontal image of Batman, and measure from the movie. That’s how he finished it.

“Mukunda kind of amazes me with his creativity, his vision of things,” Susanne continues. “They all have that somehow, this way of seeing something, and then they work on it and complete it.” At the front of the gallery, a TV is set up underneath a hand-painted sign that reads “Window Feel.” In front of the TV are two threadbare ottomans imported directly from the Angulo living room. Mukunda is futzing with things, perfecting the installation of his short film. In the short, which he wrote and directed, and which Moselle coproduced, he appears in shadow, staring through the bars of a window, as costumed characters played by his family members float by, embodying different emotions. Visnu represents something like childlike wonder, a huge set of grinning lips obscuring her real mouth, a gigantic lollipop in hand. She blows kisses at her brother as she moves out of view. “She loved it,” Susanne says, smiling. “She was in her costume and said, ‘When am I going to go? When am I going to go?’” Oscar took part, too, unsmiling, decked out in white robes, his face painted purple, a gigantic cardboard all-seeing eye plastered to his forehead and two more attached to his white-gloved palms. It’s difficult to parse exactly what he represents; the credits label him as “awareness.”

Before I leave, I ask Susanne again about the future. Once Eddie graduates, after the boys have all moved out, she tells me she’d love to leave the city. “I want to get back to the country, to wild places,” she says. “I want to grow my own food again, wake up to hear the birds sing, take walks.”

Wherever she goes, she’d like to share it with other women like her. Susanne has big dreams, and she chooses her words carefully to describe them. “What I’d really like to do,” she begins slowly, “is to start a healing center/vacation retreat/ranch where women and children who have been mistreated or abused, who have not had positive influences in their lives, where they can come and spend five days or a week and a half. They can taste a lot of good, organic food, see chickens, go running.” The goal would be not to provide therapy, not to force women to make decisions about their lives, but just to nurture them, to remind them of a different way of being. “I think a lot of women, what they really need is just to know that it doesn’t matter what situation they’re in, that they have support,” Susanne says. She would particularly like to catch the people who fall through the cracks. “There are shelters and places for women who are abused, but those are for the people who have taken that step,” she explains. “There are a lot of people who are not at that place yet. Those are the people that I want to get.”

It’s difficult to hear this and not wonder if she’s talking about herself, too. I ask if she wishes somebody over the years had offered this type of support to her. “Yes,” she says without hesitation. “Just to know that we were pretty poor. We didn’t have a lot of money. These women and their children, they don’t even have money to pay for a bus ticket to get to the airport. Everything would have to be done for them, paid for. Which is kind of the beauty of it. That they would have this opportunity that could just be like a breath.” She sharply inhales, lets the air out slowly. “Even if it’s just for a moment. Just this window in their life: Look at this! It’s so different!”

I can’t help but pick up on her use of the word window. Windows are a recurring theme in the Angulo family. There are the apartment windows that offered Susanne and her sons their only reliable aperture onto the real world. There’s Mukunda’s movie, whose final shot is a window, smashed to bits. There’s that trapped, frightened hummingbird, hurling itself against the panes of glass, rescued by Susanne and too stunned to fly away. And there’s the window in time that she’d like to offer to other woman who feel trapped in lives that haven’t quite gone how they’d hoped.

Hummingbird or savior, Susanne is resolved. Oscar, she tells me, would likely leave the city with her. He’s less on board with her other plans. “But it’s something that I really want to pursue,” she says, undeterred.